Christianity versus Religion, Part II

The Burden of Truth

In my last post, I broached the subject of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion to Christianity – or specifically to the longstanding civic religion of the West, that is to say, the organizing and self-propagating force of Western Civilization, irrespective of truth or falsity, in which the role of faith seems ambiguous at best. Whether that longstanding civic religion still stands, how it relates to the truth of the Gospel, and to what degree it may even be identified as Christianity, is open to some doubt.

Despite this, Hirsi Ali herself does not deserve to be the scapegoat for this issue. She is quite open about the fervent and proselytizing Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood being her first introduction to strong convictions – and such Islam does not distinguish a separate, thematically “religious” realm within the dar-al-Islam – nor could it very well, as the leadership of the Prophet and the Arabic of the Qur’an essentially built a nation out of the sands, and that nation, according to some strains in Sunni Islam, continues on a divinely ordained plan toward an earthly caliphate. Although I am no expert here, I can say confidently that such beliefs, while not universal in Islam, are grounded in serious theology – including the great Medieval philosopher-theologian al-Ghazali, who held the establishment of the caliphate to be a literal religious obligation – far more than any analogous movement in Christianity is or ever has been; the closest analogy would be the Donation of Constantine which, besides being a forgery, was in no way a theological document. Whatever can be said of this position in Islam, it is not incoherent.

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A mind formed in this way may hold different beliefs, as a glass may hold different liquids, or change its shape, like a sack – but changing shape and content at once is daunting. A single totalizing impulse learned with regard to Islam can carry over to atheism and from there to Christianity… but it need not be so. There is a Christianity that can be a vehicle of change here.

This Christianity will not come easy – not for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and not for any of us. One might like to think that Christianity, which was and is a global phenomenon, with no particular national identity – indeed, uprooted from its first region of growth, by Islam no less – and with an original call to global evangelization and a universal message, should have been supremely adapted to avoiding the path of civic religion. Yet if we look to history, we see over and over and over that rulers and missionaries alike often assume that the religion of the people will follow the will of the sovereign.

Some claim that the Church lost its innocence through the original sin of aligning itself with the throne – with Rome. And indeed the Greek churches (a term of art, covering all the European Orthodox churches) have strong national identities, with all the freight that entails; a particularly sharp example of this identitarian impulse is the superimposition of multiple dioceses, hearkening back to various European churches, over the whole non-European world, especially North America and Australia, such that a single city may have a Greek bishop, a Russian bishop, a Serbian bishop, a Ukrainian bishop, and so on. The late British historian and Orthodox prelate Timothy (Bishop Kallistos) Ware characterized this situation as one of the great scandals of his church in our time.

The identity of the Latin Churches (again a term of art, comprising Roman Catholicism and the wide-ranging heritage of the Protestant Reformation), despite a certain center in the Catholic Church, is widely scattered over a vast array of theologies, haunted by the shadow of the historic papal claims to temporal authority, and above all implicated in and heavily entangled with the taint of colonialism – a point to which I will return.

While all these daunting issues affect Christianity as an historical process, none of them is intrinsic or structural. This at once sets Christianity apart – there is no unbreakable bloodline to the people of Israel in its past, nor any caliphate in its future – and weighs heavily as a responsibility. And time and again this responsibility has been neglected, failed, betrayed. One of the conspicuous tragedies of colonialism (a far better candidate for an original sin of Christians than the conversion of Rome) was the scandal of bringing, as it were in one motion, the Gospel and “civilization” (all too often, no more than Western European cultural habits and prejudices) to a supposedly barbarous and unenlightened world. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, in Truth and Tolerance, emphasizes how interculturality (the communion of an at least latent common fraternity in Christ), rather than inculturation (the grafting of an integral element in one culture onto another) is the mode proper to mission and evangelization. He writes: “‘[I]nculturation’ presupposes that, as it were, a culturally naked faith is transferred into a culture that is indifferent from the religious point of view, so that two agents that were hitherto alien to each other meet and now engage in a synthesis together. But this depiction is first of all artificial and unreal, because there is no such thing as a culture-free faith and because – outside of modern technical civilization – there is no such thing as religion-free culture. But above all one cannot see how two organisms that are in themselves totally alien to each other should, through a transplantation that starts by mutilating them both, suddenly become a single living whole. Only if it is true that all cultures are potentially universal and have an inner capacity to be open to others can interculturality lead to new and fruitful forms.” Such fruitful forms are not fostered by claims of cultural superiority irrelevant to – indeed, in spirit inimical to – the Gospel itself.

The marginalization of Orthodoxy and the tragic and violent decimation of the Syrian Churches (who, as much as they suffered in the name of Islam, were failed by European Christendom, Western and Eastern alike) generates the illusion that Christianity is a Western European ethno-national religion. While for serious ethno-nationalists, this illusion is not particularly compelling, many of today’s “Christian nationalists” seem to operate on such an assumption. Yet in fact things are actually quite a bit worse than that. It seems plausible that as long as there are rulers, there will be civic religion – and, with due opprobrium to ethno-nationalism, state atheism may be the supreme civic religion of all. And that is not all – non-state actors (to borrow an ominous term) have their own strings to pull; as the novelist David Foster Wallace put it, “the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings…. And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self” – not precisely a civic religion per se, but something that serves a like purpose for civil pacification.

What, then? Is the believer to seek what is above, to look to the supernatural for vindication? After all, God deceives no one. Yet when one walks in border realms, “discernment of the true gifts from the false and knowledge of how and at what time they may be exercised demands much counsel and much light from God”– so St. John of the Cross. Moreover, he adds, “the exercise of these supernatural works and graces does not require grace and charity; either God truly bestows them as he did to the wicked prophet Balaam and to Solomon, or they are effected falsely by means of the Devil, as in the case of Simon Magus.” A terrifying thought – and given that, some of what I have seen from public Christians in my larger circle of acquaintance is worrisome.

I do not know Ross Douthat, of the New York Times; his mother is an acquaintance, and was a friend of my late father. His article on Hirsi Ali’s conversion leads with a properly non-judgmental reading of Hirsi Ali herself, via a brief pirouette over psychological theory associating belief in “invisible minds and impossible beings” with our daily experience of the minds of other people, into a long reflection on unexplained phenomena in general. This culminates in a particular and particularly elaborated focus on ufology and extraterrestrial encounters, as mediated by the books of UNC-Wilmington religious studies professor Diana Walsh Pasulka, and the conclusion that “the world is much stranger than the secular imagination thinks.” This sounds distressingly like the mere fact that scientistic materialist physicalism falls short of explaining the world, is something in which we should be rejoicing. In truth, we should be eager for science to step in wherever possible and to grow its capacities; miracles are glorious insofar as they convey charity and grace, but a world with a broad preternatural middle ground between the natural and the supernatural is a dark, dangerous and demon-haunted place.

In contrast, longtime American Conservative editor Rod Dreher, now an expatriate in Hungary and writing for The European Conservative, is sensitive and confessional, paralleling Hirsi Ali’s account of her recent and embryonic conversion with his own decades of religious seeking, from indifferentism over Catholicism into Orthodoxy. He writes, among other things, that “faith is poetry, not syllogism,” (but must it be one or the other?) and recounts that her writings made him feel “not like marking down a theology undergraduate paper with a red pen, but like rushing in with my prayers to help a broken angel learn to fly. She is imperfectly Christian today; she may be more perfectly Christian tomorrow. And so, by God’s grace, will you and I.”

This is poetry, indeed – and a beautiful sentiment. Rod was a friendly acquaintance, years ago; I believed then, and believe now, that he’s a good man. And prayers are exactly what any new Christian needs. Yet the subjective, personal process of conversion speaks to the life and soul of every Christian as it occurs in that life and that soul – but there are powerful supports that are applicable to all and available to all. The goal is not “a clean, intellectually respectable conversion,” as Rod writes, no more than it is syllogisms or even dogma; what is needed, especially for persons engaged with ideas and concepts by training and character, is a disposition that embraces critical thinking and the attainability of truth with confidence, on the basis of public revelation and sound teaching. And thus more cause for worry: as I checked Rod’s articles page at The European Conservative, I found, almost immediately preceding his meditation on conversion, an interview with… UNC-Wilmington religious studies professor Diana Walsh Pasulka, who speculates about UAPs (the new term for UFOs) as angels, demons, souls in Purgatory... by the way, Dr. Pasulka is a practicing Catholic. Which leads me to ask: what is this? Are we not the religion of the Logos? Let the world puzzle over what to make of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena – Christians should be clear on what matters here, which is the Gospel of Christ. As Brother Guy Consolomagno, S.J., astronomer of the Vatican Observatory answered, when asked if he would baptize an extraterrestrial: “Only if she asked.”

Neither spookiness nor autobiographical subjectivity are any help here. We need reason; we need light, and the confidence that light brings. As the Lord himself said in the Gospel of John: Are there not twelve hours in a day? If one walks during the day, he does not stumble, because he sees the light of this world. But if one walks at night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him. And Ratzinger notes: “Looking back, we might say that the force which transformed Christianity into a world religion lay in its own synthesis of reason, faith, life. And it is none other than this synthesis that is summarized in the expression religio vera.” It is – returning to Varro’s terms – civic religion and mythic religion that have undermined this the most.

A last thought. This is an excerpt from an open letter to Ayaan Hirsi Ali from her long-time friend Richard Dawkins, biologist and probably the world’s most famous atheist: “As you know, you are one of my absolutely favourite people but ... seriously, Ayaan? You, a Christian? You are no more a Christian than I am. I might agree with you (I actually do) that Putinism, Islamism, and postmodernish wokery pokery are three great enemies of decent civilisation. I might agree with you that Christianity, if only as a lesser of evils, is a powerful weapon against them. I might add that Christianity has been the inspiration for some of the greatest art, architecture and music the world has ever known. But so what?  … I might agree (I think I do, although certainly not in its earlier history) that Christianity is morally superior to Islam. I might even agree that Christianity is the bedrock of our civilisation (actually I don’t, but even if I did ...) None of that comes remotely even close to making me – or you – a Christian.

I have seen a very recent filmed discussion in which you described me as one of the most Christian people you know. This came after you quoted Roger Scruton as saying to you that you act like a Christian, you behave like a Christian, therefore you are a Christian. But Ayaan, that is so wrong. How you, or I, behave is utterly irrelevant. What matters is what you believe. What matters is the truth claims about the world which you think are true.” (Emphasis mine.)

As for these last two sentences, I could not agree with Dawkins more – and Ratzinger would, as well: “Culture is set against truth…. This relativism, which is nowadays to be found, as a basic attitude of enlightened people, penetrating far into the realm of theology, is the most profound difficulty of our age. This is also the reason why practice is now substituted for truth and why the whole axis of religions is thereby displaced: we do not know what is true, but we do know what we should do: raise up and introduce a better society, the ‘kingdom’, as people like to say, using a term taken from the Bible and applied to the profane and utopian sphere. Ecclesiocentricity, christocentricity, theocentricity – all these now seem to be rendered obsolete by regnocentricity, the centering of things around the kingdom as the common task of all religions.”

Returning to Dawkins, I would like to add that I also respect the voice in which he writes, which is genuinely that of a friend, if a misguided one. I would add that we cannot totally know what even our friends believe, beyond what they tell us, and that Dawkins (and all of us) might do well to consider seriously what we might believe or do, if we had been formed in the life and history that was hers.

For my part, I do not know Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I hope she is entering into the light. I do not have great confidence in the civic Christianity in which she places her hope, but I do have faith in Christ. If all this is so, the essential path is, surprisingly, “freedom from religion” – that is, loosing the shackles that bind the power of worship to unworthy idols. Our hope has next to nothing to do with a restoration of Christendom. Our true hope lies, not in “rechristianizing America” or “rechristianizing Europe” or “rechristianizing the West,” but in rechristianizing... Christianity.